Directed By Tyler Perry

Starring – Tyler Perry, Cassi Davis, Patrice Lovely

The Plot – A joyous family reunion becomes a hilarious nightmare as Madea (Perry) and the crew travel to backwoods Georgia, where they find themselves unexpectedly planning a funeral that might unveil unsavory family secrets.

Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content, adult language, and drug references throughout

POSITIVES

– Still par for the course is the exceptional make-up work that distinguishes the many characters that Perry and friends portray. While nothing of substance that will surely win an Oscar in the category, there is enough detailing in the form of greying hairs, saggy skin, and additional prosthetics that allows the actor inside to fully immerse themselves in the beat of the character, and carve out an air of respect to the film’s limited production to be able to impress in any area of the spectrum. It’s one of the only things in Madea movies that I’ve always tipped my hat to, and the vibrancy in variety that each character sports makes each of them noticeable without their prosthetic designs rubbing together in repetition.

– A scene of substance? I know, in a Tyler Perry film this is groundbreaking news, but there is a moment late in the film in which the Mother of this family, portrayed by Jen Harper, not only steals the film, but does so by conjuring this emotionally moving strip of dialogue that will inspire female audiences who see it. Harper proves that she may be the one actress who deserves better than being subjected to this slop, and through measured responses of anger, regret, and patience, her character diminishes the line of what should be overlooked in modern day relationships.

NEGATIVES

– Bloated run time. There is absolutely no reason for this film to be anywhere near two hours, but it is because once again scenes are stretched in a way that assists Perry in containing budgets without frequenting between sets. Without question, the Improv humor is the thing that truly makes these scenes unbearable, muttering off line after line of atrocious conversation and jumbled dialogue that add about as much to the perspective of the film as integrity does. How can a movie bore you ten minutes in? “A Madea Family Funeral” feels like being a kid again, when you were forced to sit there and endure your older family members talk for hours about the “Good old days”, and you sitting there thinking how great your life would be if you were put up for adoption.

– Two cars racing towards a collision. This film has serious tonal problems, and I say that because half of it is a sluggish comedy with Madea and her friends, and then there’s a polar opposite direction with a family drama that is ungluing at the seams. Both are highly contradictive towards the other, making the progression of this film and each respective subplot feel like a tug of war that is constantly fighting against its own self-momentum. What’s most surprising is as a vehicle for Madea’s supposed goodbye, she never feels like the main character or focus in her own movie, with each appearance feeling like a shoe-horned cameo in one of Perry’s B-grade dramatic offerings that never got half of the box office take that his leading lady accomplished.

– Technical problems. Most productions and filmmakers grow from past blunders with experience, but Perry as a helmer has proven that he doesn’t take notes for the horrendous bloopers that fill his screen. Choppy A.D.R that feels like a Kung Fu film dubbed for American audiences, actors corpsing in laughter throughout serious scenes, and blurry lighting schemes that are so bright and unedited that they felt like I was waking up from a long night of drinking. All of this pales in comparison however to the biggest offender of all: body doubles in the background that come nowhere close to replicating the actor in question. There’s a scene where David Otunga, a muscular black man, obviously wasn’t there for the day’s shots, so the film fills in his absence with a light skinned, thin as a beanpole actor, whose comparison gave me the one laugh that I had during the film. Filmmaking this bad is offensive, not just to me paying money to watch this movie, but to the loads of aspiring filmmakers who can’t catch a break despite someone in Hollywood doing the craft much worse.

– Perry’s direction. The only thing worse than Perry as this wretched title character is his work behind the lens in inspiring his actors to go above the material. I mentioned Harper earlier, and that was only a single scene. The rest of the cast is virtually wasted playing second fiddle to Perry’s four characters who take up a majority of screen time. Beyond this, when the supporting cast do get a chance to shine, their deliveries feel cold and unconvincing in a way that lacked complete motivation. It’s sad because if this is indeed the big break for some of these actors, I see their days ahead for casting being very dark and humbling because Perry has given them the depth of a late night Skinemax flick. Without boobs, a Skinemax film becomes pointless. Catch my drift?

– What funeral? What’s commendable at least with the funeral scenes in the film is that they are sometimes a clever take on the bloated nature of funeral services, but the problem is that it takes so long to even reach the pivotal setting of this movie, pushing audiences through a redundant endurance test with scenes that feel so far removed from where this film inevitably takes us. There are 28 minutes remaining in the film when we finally hit the mourning services, and it comes and goes with so little weight compared to the rest of the story moving around it. When you compare it to “Boo: A Madea Halloween”, that whole film revolves around that magical night where anything can and often does happen, but the funeral here is a footnote in a bigger picture in a film that goes nowhere, emphasizing what little they could actually do with such a constricting gimmick.

– Characters missing frequently. As I mentioned before, Perry dons make-up and multiple costume changes to become four different characters in the film, and after seeing some flawed continuity errors catch up to him, maybe it’s best that he release his grip on feeling so ambitious. There are many examples of this throughout, but the most glaring one is the very last scene of the movie, where Madea and friends are leaving, with a certain driver missing from the goodbyes all together. Did they leave Brian (Perry) with this struggling family. Did he run away from the madness that is dealing with these window lickers every single day? I’d say we will never find out, but we all know that another mindless Madea effort is coming. Otherwise, I’d have to rely on Adam Sandler or Kirk Cameron to make my life a living hell, and they’ve been traded to Netflix in recent years, where I don’t have to give a shit about either of them.

– An uncomfortable commentary. I won’t go over it much, but I can’t escape this uneasy feeling that Perry continues to flirt with, in that light skinned African Americans are evil. Every single one of the characters who fill this description in the movie are either cheaters, abusive, or completely out of their minds crazy, and I can’t begin to even entertain the idea why this is the case in every single Perry directed movie thus far. It’s not only made it to where each character’s motives are completely predictable when fleshed out, but also a bit of a cliche for how he can’t remove himself from this particular agenda.

– Why the humor fails. Aside from the material residing in the grounds of redundancy where every joke missed by audiences is replayed three or four times, there’s very little diagraming or set-up to Perry’s comedy that builds towards the big payoff. The accents as well do their parts to take audiences out of the attention span of the conversation, playing into audible kryptonite for much of the expectations in deliveries that never reach their desired destination. Patrice Lovely is by far the worst in this regards, because her screeching delivery and stroke victim face come off as feeling catered to three year old’s who just need a funny face and boisterous enactments to earn their praise.

– Visually, this film still withstands the presentational value of a Sears Air conditioner commercial, complete with cheap cinematography and stilted editing that is a chore to keep focus on. Establishing shots feel very conventional, refusing to leave the safety of exterior house depictions that was made famous only thirty years ago during the boom of network sitcoms. For all of the money that Perry has made, he deserves to flex some cash into crafting an exceptional Madea movie that stands out above the rest, but one unfortunate common theme in these films is that each one feels substantially more amateurish in its filmmaking, an aspect that continues with “Family Funeral”.

My Grade: 2/10 or F-